This year MiReKoc Summer School explored the theme of “Diasporas and Transnational Communities”. Described as “awkward dance partners” by Thomas Faist, the concepts of diasporas and transnational communities have been increasingly coined together within the international migration scholarship in the last decades. While the old concept of diaspora has initially been used to characterize specific (and usually victimized) populations living outside of an (imagined) homeland, the term of transnational communities was taken into account within the larger framework of transnationalism studies, evoking continuous ties across states’ physical borders. Even though many scholars agree that both terms address cross-border linkages of certain populations, the intellectual debate lingers on how well the two terms overlap with each other.